PERSPECTIVE ON IRAQ : This Road Should Look Familiar : An autonomous Kurdish region could work, but only a strong U.N. presence can prevent another Palestine.

Public opinion does count. The arch-practitioner of Realpolitik, George Bush, has been compelled to intervene to save the Kurds. The media that he and his allies so successfully muzzled during Desert Storm were allowed to do their job in the war’s aftermath. And they found an audience with their heart-rending reports from the Iranian and Turkish mountains, particularly among the fairer sex.

Women, reported the opinion polls in the United States, Britain and France, were never as keen as men on the war. And now they’ve been making their voice clear over the plight of the Kurds. Danielle Mitterrand and Norma Major have bent their husbands’ ears. Even Margaret Thatcher, dropping her traditional sang-froid, has demanded that something be done.

What next? Feeding the refugees, even returning the Kurds, if they want to return, to the villages and towns may not be too difficult, given the chastened condition of Saddam Hussein and the renewed threat of superior force.

What then? Is the Kurdish problem going to become, like the Palestinian, an oozing boil of pus continuously poisoning the Middle East? In this part of the world the temporary has a nasty habit of becoming permanent, and the solutions that look so sensible and obvious one day disappear over the horizon the next.

Before World War I, there was no Palestinian problem as such. Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and its population was 90% Arab. To defeat the Turks, the British had encouraged Arab revolt on the promise of Arab independence, including Palestine. To win world Jewish support in the war against Germany, the British, in the Balfour Declaration, promised “a national home for the Jewish people.”

Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, of course, never anticipated Adolf Hitler and the massive exodus of European Jews to Palestine. In 1917, at the time of the Declaration, Jews were only 8% of Palestine’s population. By 1939, they were 30% and growing fast. The rest of the story everyone knows.

The parallels are all too obvious. How do the allies and the United Nations encourage the Kurds to return home and stay home? Less than pleasant it might be in a Turkish or Iranian refugee camp, but at least one’s family isn’t going to be butchered. What’s the point of returning home if the allies are going to stay only a month or two? Once they’ve gone, Saddam Hussein might start his final pogrom.

In short, the Kurds are going to ask, like the Palestinians and Jews before them, for promises and commitments. Indeed, although so far they’ve only asked for autonomy, their present sense of insecurity could persuade them that the time has come to ask for nothing less than independence, and independence not just for Iraqi Kurds but for those of Iran, Turkey and Syria, too.

Before long, George Bush, John Major and Francois Mitterrand are going to wish they’d listened to Richard Nixon and “taken a contract” on Hussein’s life.

But how realistically to get out of this one? There’s no easy answer. This is the consequence of sending in half a million soldiers and deciding to drive Iraq out of Kuwait by force, rather than relying on the steady but less unsettling attrition of total sanctions.

The only saving grace is that, unlike during the decades of dealing with Israel and the Palestinians, we now have a really strong, united and potentially truly effective United Nations.

A U.N.-secured autonomous region for the Kurds of Iraq could work--if the its force were made strong enough, and if the hand of the Security Council held steady enough. Make no mistake, it is going to demand an enormous commitment of resources and manpower, at least initially until Hussein perceives that the United Nations is serious. Sooner, rather than later, the American, French and British military units should be formally internationalized under the direct authority of the Security Council. Also, half of them should be quickly replaced by soldiers from the traditional U.N. peacekeeping nations, together with contingents from representative Muslim nations and, not least, from the Soviet Union.

It is a different way of running the world than we are used to. It is the way it increasingly must go. Not just in Iraq this week, but next in Cambodia, Liberia and El Salvador.